摘要：While epidemiologists, medical geographers and public health practitioners have known for long that human health is not only about the individual body but should also be understood at the population level within particular geographic contexts, contemporary environmental and socioeconomic concerns (particularly global environmental change and globalization) have brought unprecedented attention to the connection between human health and factors at the landscape and even the global levels. As a result, in the past two decades, studies of human health from geographic perspectives and research on applying geospatial analyses to health problems have experienced tremendous development (in this essay, we use geospatial health research as a general term to refer to this kind of research) (e.g., Gatrell and Elliott 2009; Pearce and Witten 2010; Cromley and McLafferty 2011; Kwan 2013). Recent landmarks of this development include the position paper by Richardson et al. (2013) in Science, articulation of the uncertain geographic context problem (Kwan 2012a, 2012b) and the ongoing Spatial Uncertainty Program launched by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2011.
